Ok, I don’t usually share personal pictures (and let alone selfie-style ones), but this time I felt I had to.Last week, on the 9th of August, I had a Skype conference about Creativity and Positive Attitude with the international team of a new company from Madrid. I had been invited to speak as an expert on the link between those two themes and to answer their questions for an hour and a half.

So I all I wanted for that time was a place where I could focus in the right mindset and listen to their doubts, trying to find solutions and share the most useful ideas for them during that time.Aware of the importance of a professional conference call of this type, specially the ones with teams who are already working in the creative field, I first thought of doing it in the meeting room of my co-work office, where silence and peace were guaranteed.

But then I thought: “Come on! We are going to talk about inspiration, about curiosity, about learning from the environment and from the others, about “the possible” and about using our personal strengths for the creative process. And I am going to speak about all these things sited in a closed space, away from most of the things that actually inspire me and cause me awe?”

So I chose… A park. A beautiful park from Porto, with Wi-Fi connection, confortable benches and surrounded by sun and trees. Because this is what Creativity and Positive Attitude are about, in my opinion. It is about creating your own inspiration space; about knowing yourself well enough to understand what initiates the creative spark in you; what triggers the best mood to reply to an intellectual challenge; what are the atmospheres that can make your train of thought flow easier and better. And this was what I was supposed to do in that meeting: not show that I was an expert, but allow my expertise to actually flow at its best to this team of people.

So this is the picture of the end of the conference call that had a team in a studio in Madrid surrounded by post-its and colors in one side, and an expert on Creativity and Applied Positive Psychology, sharing thoughts, ideas, processes and strategies surrounded by trees, barefoot (and with a blue healing strip on her leg) on the other side.

The level of energy and the amount of insights of the team in the end of the conference was absolutely brilliant and the connection we created, even in the distance, was surprisingly good. (Lina Ruiz Mingote, the Public Relations & Communications Manager of the company, described it like this).

But above all, this was my expression at the end of this hour and a half sharing my professional passions in a place where I feel good: open smile coming from within and the feeling of having made the best choice by following authenticity.​

It is not only literature that confirms the importance of being genuine. After 12 years working as a freelancer I feel a growing certainty about this: the more you are working with passion, focus, giving the best in you and following your own best practices, the more you will guarantee being in the best way on a coherent professional path.And so here it is: a picture of an authentic smile, celebrating coherent ways of being a happy professional, or at least in the best way to it.